YoYo Games moderator RedChu has published the first issue of Overbyte which “will try to be a monthly magazine”.

Unlike many other Game Maker magazines Overbyte does not take itself too seriously – a good idea of what to expect comes for the very first page, headed “OHAI”, which states:

“This being our first issue, it means it’s our biggest ever. Inside these virtual pages you will find some of the most intriguing artifacts to surface since another intriguing artifact that surfaced sometime ago,…”

There are some amusing observations starting off with “it’s safe to assume the majority of those games [entered into YYG competition 5] aren’t going to win.”

Content wise there is a short news round-up, a look at the upcoming GameJolt weekend Game Jam, an interview with Ben Smith – creator of the SigmaNine game maker community, 6 game reviews and a few odds-and-ends at the back on the magazine.

I quite like the humorous comments on stories throughout the magazine although I expect this will serve only to annoy some people and the novelty may wear off after a few issues!

The best issue of a Game Maker magazine that has been released for a long time.

Brady– not quite the place for it, as you intuit, but it’s actually quite simple to do with drag-and-drop.

In the Create Event of your player object, create two variables (we’ll call them “hits” and “vuln”) and define them as 0.

In the collision event for the mushroom-type object, set the variable “hits” to 1 (this is assuming collecting more mushrooms/power-ups doesn’t give you more hits), change the sprite to your larger sprite, and destroy the other (that is, the mushroom) object.

In the collision event for the enemy, you’ll want to check both variables (that’s the little stop-sign shaped box w/ the VAR in it in drag-and-drop), first checking “vuln” (and I’ll explain why in a moment) then checking “hits”: if “vuln” is equal to 0, then check if “hits” is equal to 1; if “hits” IS equal to 1, then change the value of “hits” to 0, change the sprite to the smaller sprite, change the value of “vuln” to 1 and set an alarm for however many frames you want the character to be invulnerable– ELSE (that is, if “hits” is not equal to 1) then destroy the player object, restart the room, set lives relative to -1, etc.

In the alarm event we set off during the enemy collision, you’ll change “vuln” back to 0.

The reason why you’d want to use “vuln” is because otherwise the game will keep checking the collision with the enemy object and kill the player almost instantly; while “vuln” is equal to 1, the game won’t enact the other events.

In the future, you really should go somewhere like the GMC forums (gmc.yoyogames.com) with a question like this. I found that they’re very helpful when you’re just trying to find your feet with Game Maker.

hi,im brady at a unrelated way id like to know if you can help me,im making a game i want to have lives like on super mario bros.3 where you need to get mushrooms and when something hits you you go small and when you get hit when your small you die,please help…email me at bbgunn12@hotmail.com

Really encouraging start. Very nice layout overall with only minor spacing problems here and there. Some welcome humor but a little memetastic. The comic was a let down and should probably be eliminated from any future issues. I’ve yet to see a funny comic in any of these magazines. Regardless of my badmouthing, I liked the issue. Good luck with Overbyte, RC.